ARTIST INFO

b. 1961Nadav Kander is recognized as one of the most original and highly regarded photographers of our time. His work forms part of the public collection at the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.Kander’s most recent and highly acclaimed fine art photography project titled “Yangtze - The Long River” won the 2009 Prix Pictet. A monograph of the works in this series was recently published by Hatje Cantz (September 2010).Other awards include the D&AD and the John Kobal Foundation in the UK; Epica in Europe; the Art Director’s Club and IPA in the USA and the Silver Photographer of the Year Award at Lianzhou International Photo Festival 2008 in China. He was also awarded the prestigious Royal Photographic Society’s ‘Terence Donovan’ Award in 2002 and was nominated for the Schweppes Photographic Portrait Prize in 2003.His portraits of celebrities - from actors to world leaders - appear regularly in top publications such as The Sunday Times Magazine, New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Time Magazine, Another Man, and Dazed & Confused. In 2009, The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to “Obama’s People”, Kander’s 52 portraits of President Obama’s inaugural administration.He is currently based in London.

SERIES INFO

Drawn to the immense scale of China and its development, Kander’s newest project focuses on the Yangtze River, whose banks and waterways provide home and livelihood for hundreds of millions of Chinese. Taken along the river from its source in remote western China to its mouth just off the shores of Shanghai, these photographs, shown here for the very first time, depict the human footprint of habitat and industry that can be seen along the shores of China’s longest river.

Yangtze - The Long RiverBy Nadav Kander

The Yangtze River, which forms the premise to this body of work, is the main artery that flows 4100miles (6500km) across china, travelling from its furthest westerly point in Qinghai Province to Shanghai in the east. The river is embedded in the consciousness of the Chinese, even for those who live thousands of miles from the river. It plays a significant role in both the spiritual and physical life of the people.

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More people live along its banks than live in the USA, one in every eighteen people on the planet.

Using the river as a metaphor for constant change, I have photographed the landscape and people along its banks from mouth to source.

Importantly for me I worked intuitively, trying not to be influenced by what I already knew about the country. I wanted to respond to what I found and felt and to seek out the iconography that allowed me to frame views that make the images unique to me.

After several trips to different parts of the river, it became clear that what I was responding to and how I felt whilst being in china was permeating into my pictures; a formalness and unease, a country that feels both at the beginning of a new era and at odds with itself. China is a nation that appears to be severing its roots by destroying its past in the wake of the sheer force of its moving “forward” at such an astounding and unnatural pace. A people scarring their country and a country scarring its people.

I felt a complete outsider and explained this pictorially by “stepping back” and showing humans dwarfed by their surroundings. Common man has little say in China’s progression and this smallness of the individual is alluded to in the work.

Although it was never my intention to make documentary pictures, thesociological context of this project is very important and ever present. The displacement of 3 million people in a 600km stretch of the River and the effect on humanity when a country moves towards the future at pace are themes that will inevitably be present within the work.

A Chinese man who I became friends with whilst working on the project reiterated what many Chinese people feel: “ Why do we have to destroy to develop?” He explained how in Britain many of us could revisit the place of our childhood, knowing that it will be much the same, it will remind us of our families and upbringing. In China that is virtually impossible, the scale of development has left most places unrecognisable, “Nothing is the same. We can’t revisit where we came from because it no longer exists.”

China’s landscape both economically and physically is changing daily. These are photographs that can never be taken again.